Service meshes: an in-depth introduction

This article provides an overview of service meshes, highlighting their benefits and complexities.

A service mesh is a complex evolution of networking, security, and operational challenges encountered when deploying microservices at a web scale. It offers benefits such as obtaining golden signals for services, configuring automatic retries, setting timeouts, traffic shaping, authN/authZ, and auto mTLS to increase security posture.

The article covers the control and data planes, explaining how the proxies are hooked up, and the most common use cases for adopting the mesh seen in the wild, such as mutual TLS, metrics and tracing, advanced deployment strategies, and multiple cluster meshes.

The author concludes with a warning that service meshes can be complex, and learning them requires time and expertise.